Incident 899: Character.ai Chatbots Allegedly Emulating School Shooters and Their Victims

Description: Some Character.ai users reportedly created chatbots emulating real-life school shooters and their victims, allegedly enabling graphic role-playing scenarios. Character.ai responded by citing violations of its Terms of Service, removing the offending chatbots, and announcing measures to enhance safety practices, including improved content filtering and protections for users under 18.

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Entities

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Alleged: Character.AI developed an AI system deployed by Character.AI users, which harmed Character.AI users , Victims of school shootings and Families of the victims of school shootings.

Alleged implicated AI system: Character.AI

Incident Stats

Incident ID

899

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-12-17

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

A Google-Backed AI Startup Is Hosting Chatbots Modeled After Real-Life School Shooters — and Their Victims

futurism.com

Character.AI Faces Scrutiny Over School Shooter Chatbots

forbes.com

futurism.com · 2024

Content warning: this story discusses school violence, sexual abuse, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders and other disturbing topics.

A chatbot, hosted by the Google-backed startup Character.AI, immediately throws the user into a terrifyin…

forbes.com · 2025

The Charcter.AI logo on a smartphone.

Character.AI, a Google-backed AI chatbot platform, is facing scrutiny after reports revealed last month that some users created chatbots emulating real-life school shooters a…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.